Hill's Science Plan Perfect Digestion Small & Mini Adult Dog Food with Turkey review

This tray lands in our Average band. Most adult wet food reaches our Excellent band, and the gap comes almost entirely from what the label is willing to show. Turkey is named and the prebiotic blend is broken out in full, but the bulk of the recipe stays behind category terms. Protein and processing and transparency both read Good, with nutritional balance a step behind at Average. That is a reading of the paperwork rather than a judgement on the food, and a small dog who eats this happily and settles on it is not being let down by it.

Ingredients, as declared: Meat and animal derivatives (turkey 7%), derivatives of vegetable origin, cereals, vegetables, eggs and egg derivatives, minerals, fruit, seeds, oils and fats. ActivBiome+ Digestion prebiotic blend (1.3%): Ground pecan shell, flaxseed, dried beet pulp, dried citrus pulp, dried cranberries.

Turkey is the named animal at 7%, printed inside the meat and animal derivatives entry that leads the list. Turkey is lean and easily digested, a reason it appears so often in recipes pitched at delicate dogs. That 7% is the only part of the animal content you can actually see.

Behind the meat, derivatives of vegetable origin comes ahead of cereals, a small but real difference from the chicken version of the same recipe. Both terms are broad enough to be filled differently between batches, and neither one tells you which plant or which grain is doing the work in the tray.

ActivBiome+ at 1.3% is the label's most open passage. All five are named: dried citrus pulp, dried cranberries, ground pecan shell, dried beet pulp and flaxseed. The beet and citrus pulps in particular are the fermentable fibres a digestion recipe is normally built on.

The analysis is complete and gentle throughout. Moisture is declared at 79.0%, protein converts to 24.8% of dry matter, fat to 15.7% and crude fibre to 4.8%, with calcium at 0.9% of dry matter. Energy is light at 83 kcal per 100g against the 97 typical for adult wet food, so portions look generous for the size of dog eating them.

Every added mineral is printed with its dose, a small piece of transparency worth crediting. Iron is at 12.0mg per kilo, zinc at 33.6mg, and iodine, copper and manganese each carry a figure beside them.

Sold in a 200 g tray.

On the label's own guide a 1.5 kg dog gets 200 grams a day, rising to 750 grams for a 10 kg dog. Taken up to a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition, on about 840 kcal a day using the standard maintenance estimate of 110 × bodyweight^0.75, the figure would be roughly 1011 grams. A dog that size is well outside what this tray is built for.